Introducing REPAiR

In recent years, the interest around so-called ‘Nature-based Solutions’ (NbS) has surged globally, and the term has become commonplace in scientific, NGO and policy literature.

NbS most often refers to an ideal type of integrative environmental project that uses a combination of existing approaches and practices. According to guidelines developed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), such projects should seek to simultaneously reduce disaster risk and build climate resilience, enhance biodiversity and address human development needs.

The NbS framework is sometimes described as an ‘umbrella’ concept that brings together a range of existing approaches to ecological restoration and management. These include conservation, ecological restoration, land management, and green infrastructure approaches.

But ideas around NbS are still evolving. Considerable research and finance have been invested to develop NbS principles, standards and guidelines for global ecosystems, but these remain very broad. What a ‘Nature-based Solution’ is in theory or practice is contested, and definitions vary across different groups.

Ongoing challenges

For example, NbS are being promoted in policy spaces as a cost-effective means to rapidly build climate and disaster-risk resilience, to halt the loss of biodiversity and achieve equitable development outcomes by harnessing natural systems and processes, ‘putting nature to work’ to address societal challenges. But important questions remain regarding scalability and financing of projects and programs.

Others claim that NbS has the potential to be more than ‘the sum of its parts’ and to surpass the limitations and hazards associated with prior approaches, due to the framework’s intended flexibility, implicit relationality, focus on context and alignment with systems thinking (Cohen-Shacham et al. 2019).

However, few existing reviews of evidence examine interlinked social, economic, and ecological outcomes together – even though delivering multiple, diverse benefits simultaneously is central to the approach.

Why context matters

Challenges are not only conceptual. The conjunctural problems NbS is meant to address – as well as capacities and knowledge to address them – vary dramatically across different regions, national policy environments, landscapes and socio-political histories, as well as among different groups of actors.

Even though there are demonstration projects and ‘experiments’ in NbS in diverse places around the world, much of the existing evidence of how to translate ideas and principles into practice on the ground comes from the Global North, from urban, wetland and forestry interventions.

At the same time, social and economic barriers and facilitators to successful implementation of NbS are poorly understood, especially in Sub-Saharan African settings.

This means asking some key questions:

Across diverse settings and existing governance systems, can emphasising landscape-scale processes, community leadership, socio-ecological relationships and foregrounding societal challenges in the design of interventions help foster resilience and reduce disaster risk in the face of intensifying environmental changes?

Can NbS projects avoid the sorts of well-documented hazards associated with overly technical, top-down and ‘one size fits all’ approaches to ecosystem governance?

How do NbS interact with landscape processes and communal governance systems ‘on the ground’ in different places with different social and environmental histories and different contemporary dynamics affecting landscapes and livelihoods?

The fact is, we don’t know the answers to these questions.

What we do know is that environmental management approaches based on generalised models of change that privilege technical precision and economic efficiency — without sufficient attention to socio-ecological context, the politics of place and situated landscape processes — can undermine transparency, justice and agency at a local level.

Such approaches can also create inequitable labour relations, and can impose ideas of sustainability and equity ‘from above’ that are a mis-match to local experience and concerns. This increases the risk of reproducing patterns of exclusion and misrepresentation that exacerbate social vulnerabilities, and lead to project failure and maladaptation.

‘Nature-based Solutions’ and rangelands

REPAiR is a new three-year research project focusing on Southern African rangelands, NbS and communal livestock farming systems that aims to explore these and other questions about the potentials and challenges of NbS.

Just as NbS have risen on the global agenda in recent years, so have rangelands come into focus as a target of landscape intervention.

It seems strange that rangelands have so far remained largely absent from mainstream international and regional debates about NbS. After all, rangelands are the most extensive land cover type on the planet, supporting billions of extensive livestock producers globally. They are home to diverse ecosystems – from open canopy grasslands to woodlands, deserts and tundra – that are ideally suited for the extensive browsing and grazing of domesticated livestock and wildlife. Across Southern Africa, communal livestock farming on rangelands sustains vast informal agrarian socio-economies, providing a wide range of social, cultural, economic and ecological values and benefits to people and wildlife, and can be a highly sustainable land-use.

Our approach

Our international research consortium brings together social and natural scientists, researchers in the environmental humanities, storytellers and visual artists, communications specialists, livestock farmers and civil society groups.

We partner with Meat Naturally Africa (MNA), a social enterprise pioneering a context-sensitive and community-led NbS approach with the goal to restore Southern Africa’s communal rangelands by working with groups of communal livestock farmers to promote regenerative herding practices, offering training and creating community incentives.

Working across MNA’s existing intervention in South Africa, we are using research evidence to construct detailed multi-method case studies of rangeland NbS that bring diverse perspectives and forms of knowledge into dialogue. These studies will help us delve deeply to better understand the contexts of intervention and how NbS interventions interact with dynamic rangeland settings in four contextual dimensions.

Four dimensions of context

We consider the spatiality of interventions, looking at the patterns, socio-ecological connections and disconnections across landscapes. This also means looking at the way land is used in different ways and combinations, and how interventions interact with the conditions that are present in landscapes.

Attention to temporality means understanding how things like environmental processes and management strategies interact with each other and change over time, and how social and environmental histories have shaped contemporary dynamics.

Attention to institutional context means understanding how actors in local governance systems think about and understand things like ‘equity’ and ‘resilience’, and how these systems support the ability of people and ecosystems to adapt to changing conditions.

We also look at policy context to understand how decisions are shaped by configurations of authority, political interest and knowledge. This will allow us to understand how policy pathways emerge; at what different levels of decision-making they emerge; and how the impacts (benefits and hazards) of these possible pathways should be assessed and distributed for different groups and at different scales.

Responding to the needs of rangeland communities

The extensive networks of research, implementation, government and community partners across MNA’s existing implementation and expansion sites in South Africa and neighbouring countries create a unique multi-scalar ‘field laboratory’ for research and policy engagement. Through international exchanges and knowledge sharing, we hope to collect lessons and stories from diverse implementation settings across the Southern Africa region.

Contextualisation provides a possible means to address and correct past knowledge and policy failures around rangeland livestock systems, and correct myths that have resulted in harmful interventions.

Through this process, we aim to inform the co-development of equitable approaches to sustainability that build on situated knowledge, experience, institutions and strategies for assessing, adapting and building resilience in the face of complex challenges faced by rangeland communities.

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